Kenny & Julia Loggins' recipe for lasting love ; the main ingredients: total honesty, commitment and a willingness to take responsibility for your feelings

Vegetarian Times, August, 1998 by Suzanne Gerber

The main ingredients: total honesty, commitment and willingness to take responsibility for your feelings.

The long and winding road to Kenny and Julia Loggins' home in the mountains of southern California is a perfect symbol of their 16-year relationship. Today they may have one of the happiest, and sanest, celebrity marriages, but that wasn't always the case. In fact, when they first met, back in 1982, they were two extremely unhappy people.

Kenny, best known for his partnership with Jim Messina and megahits like "Danny's Song" and "House at Pooh Corner," had been leading a stereotypical rock-starish life. Too much drinking and drugging had him on a collision course with an ulcer, and his doctor recommended deep intestinal cleansing. He was sent to a colon therapist named Julia Cooper, and the two felt an instant bond. But they were both married to other people, and on top of that, Kenny had three kids, so they settled, instead, for a warm, healing friendship.

Over the next six years, Kenny and Julia grew closer, but even as their own partnerships fell apart, they refused to admit to themselves, or each other, that they were falling in love. Kenny's marriage had been in trouble for years. Being on the road a lot, away from his family and in too-close proximity to worshipful groupies only added to the strain. Julia, who had grown up feeling alienated from the world because of childhood asthma, arthritis, kidney and liver disease, was married to a much older man with colon cancer. By the time she met Kenny, her marriage had long since devolved into a sexless friendship, one in which she took care of her ill husband. Ironically, Kenny and Julia decided to separate from their spouses within a couple months of each other, freeing them to start a relationship of their own.

And yet, their tale doesn't end with "happily every after." Because Kenny and Julia had each been on a path of self-exploration, they chose to use their relationship as a way to further their personal growth. By using each other as mirrors of their own hidden feelings and issues, and by relating to each other with nothing less than total honesty, they've discovered difficult things about themselves they might never have gotten to on their own. For example, one of the hardest, and most chronic, problems for them has been learning the true meaning of Kenny's fear of commitment and attraction to other women. By never settling for the simple answer and putting their relationship first, they've come to a deeper understanding of what makes each of them tick.

Throughout their courtship and eventual marriage (and the raising of their five kids--Kenny's three and the two they had together), they've kept journals and written each other letters, poems and songs. A few years back, Kenny envisioned them weaving their various writings and experiences into a book, which they did last year.

But don't confuse The Unimaginable Life: Lessons Learned on the Path of Love (Avon, 1997) with a cliched self-help book or vanity publication by a rock star having a midlife crisis. The story Kenny and Julia tell is a rare one: two people determined to find, speak and live by their own truths and approach their bond as a vehicle for spiritual development. In recent years, we've begun to realize that true health doesn't come from whole foods and supplements alone. In fact, leading medical and psychological experts are saying that having loving, intimate relationships is the single most important contributor to good health.

When we're closed off to the truth, we tend to repeat the destructive and dysfunctional patterns we learned as children. Not acknowledging our role in our problems reinforces the belief that unsatisfying relationships are a result of choosing the wrong partner rather than our still having important emotional lessons to learn.

Kenny and Julia were adamant about not writing a self-help book. They hoped that instead, by sharing their story, they could present a model for creating a lifestyle and a love relationship on a level different from the everyday. The book, which comes with an eponymous CD, was released in paperback by Avon in July. Kenny and Julia have also begun taking their show on the road, so to speak. Kenny will be performing August 17 to 21 at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, Calif., and Kenny and Julia will be speaking together on August 28 and 29 at the Living Enrichment Center in Portland, Ore. Recently I had the pleasure of visiting with them to talk about their relationship, current challenges, plans for the future, and just how one goes about creating an unimaginable life.

Isn't it scary that your most private stories are revealed in this book?

Julia: It's actually very freeing.

Kenny: My best music comes from a place of self-exploration where I can really nail what works for me--because that's what works best for other people. Those songs come from really deep emotional places and turn out to be my most universal songs. Our sense of writing this book was the same thing: If we could tell our story as honestly as possible, more people would be able to identify with that. If we just told a pretty little story about two people who fell in love and lived happily after that, who'd identify?